HOLD YOUR BREATH
THE TREES, MY GOD, THE TREES: blush and pink-colored beasts reaching 60 feet into the sky with bark that flakes off like paper scrolls. Their trunks are thick and sturdy, with thousands of individual branches extending 30 feet outward, each with its own delicate layer of snow, like frosting applied to an expensive wedding cake. They are called Erman’s birches, a deciduous tree found in Eastern Russia, Korea, and where we are now, a skin track above a ski area called Seki Onsen on the main island of Japan. It seems that if we held our breath long enough, we’d be able to hear these big trees whisper their ancient wisdom into the wind.
These trees could be here for centuries to come, rendering us and our traveling skis as memorable and meaningless as single snowflakes in the indiscriminate passage of time.
It makes sense that the trees above Seki Onsen are big and old and weathered, because this entire area is protected as a national park, which includes the small village below. Tracing its lineage back to when skiing was first introduced to this country by a European army sergeant more than 100 years ago, Seki Onsen is one of the oldest ski areas in Japan. It has just two chairlifts, a double and a single, an open backcountry policy thanks to the adjoining Myōkō-Togakushi Renzan National Park, and has been run by the same family for decades. They do everything, from selling lift tickets to bumping chairs to cooking the food. As Japan continues to be swarmed every winter by powder hounds from the Western world, Chad Sayers, Mattias Fredriksson and came to this area hoping to find the island’s old ski culture, where ski areas and villages haven’t yet been overly influenced by foreign interests. What we found went much deeper and reaffirmed that some of the biggest lessons come from the smallest places.
After about 45 minutes of climbing the skin track, we top out on a small sub-alpine ridge. We’re immediately smacked by an argumentative blast of wind that includes the earthy, rotten-egg aroma of natural hot springs. Up ahead in the
